Down and Dirty Pictures:
Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film
By Peter Biskind
Simon & Schuster, 560 pages, $24.95
If you doubt that a single book can change everything, you haven’t read Premiere editor Peter Biskind’s independent cinema tell-all Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film. It hasn’t even been on story shelves for a month, but the book has already been dissected, digested and debated by its target audiences: industry players, wannabes and spectators. And if reports from this year’s Sundance Film Festival are any indication, it is being treated not just as a dandy airplane read, but as a how-to manual—as in, "how not to get screwed by the film industry, namely Miramax."
A Jan. 22 Times article reported that Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein—characterized by Biskind as a focus group addict and compulsive re-editor, as well as an aggressive executive who scares competitors away from bidding on movies by offering insanely huge amounts of money and then ratcheting down the amounts once he has the field to himself—mounted a "pitched campaign" to buy the well-liked indie drama Garden State. But after reading Biskind’s book, the director and his team "were reluctant to entrust the film to Mr. Weinstein," and agreed to sell only after Weinstein hauled in the more outwardly respectable Fox Searchlight as a partner, purchasing the film’s domestic and international rights for $5 million. At future festivals, I can picture filmmakers carrying the paperback version of Dirty Pictures in their backpacks, on the off-chance that one of Harvey’s people comes winging in, checkbook held aloft.
Which isn’t to say that the book breaks any truly new ground. Anyone who knows anybody in the film business first heard Weinstein’s nickname, "Harvey Scissorhands", years ago, and doubtless also heard tales of his profanity, hot temper and his allegedly unscrupulous knack for scaring off competitors during the acquisitions process. The New York Observer, in particular, has turned tales of Miramax misbehavior into a semi-regular slapstick feature—a film industry "Krazy Kat," with humans standing in for lesser mammals. But Biskind’s book certifies and strengthens those gossipy stories by collecting so many of them in one place, then framing them with quotes and anecdotes from a stunning array of filmmakers, producers and distributors—from sensitive auteur Todd Haynes, reduced to tears when Miramax recut Velvet Goldmine without telling him, to alpha male movie stars Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, who tell Biskind they’re grateful to have been given the chance to make the Oscar-nominated $130 million-grossing Good Will Hunting, but still wish Weinstein had paid them the profit points he promised, then refrained from using their friendship to guilt- trip them into lowering their asking prices on subsequent projects.
The book’s details are probably heightened for dramatic effect—Biskind has a weakness for Hollywood-style, cheeseball-tough-guy prose, a la Robert Evans. But overall, the accounts seem consistent, and Biskind arranges them to create a vivid, depressing account of Weinstein, Miramax, Sundance and so-called "independent film"—a term that, with each passing year, looks less like an artistic movement and more like a marketing label. For the vast majority of non-filmmaking, non-moviegoing Americans, that’s exactly what the phrase means—which is why Biskind starts the story in 1989 with sex, lies and videotape, rather than going back to the heyday of John Sayles, John Cassavetes or Roger Corman. (Redford’s name is in the title, but he’s treated as a fairly minor character; whether this is due to Redford’s refusal to be interviewed by Biskind or the fact that he’s less colorful than Weinstein is anybody’s guess.)
Like Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Biskind’s similarly scandalous tome about cinema’s rock ’n’ generation, Dirty Pictures is less interested in the content (and context) of movies than in the details of who screwed whom and how. A person unfamiliar with Biskind’s magazine articles might come away from this book and Easy Riders thinking of him as a business or gossip reporter (or both), rather than a journalist-historian who can describe key American films in jazzy grafs that sum up their content, form and message. It’s probably the critic in me, but I like Biskind best when he’s doing the latter. His description of Billy Bob Thornton’s Sling Blade character is a keeper ("a holy fool, a misunderstood cornpone Frankenstein"), and his analysis of Reservoir Dogs in context of former Video Archives employee Quentin Tarantino’s career ambition is one of the freshest takes on the film that I’ve ever read: "Filled with jokes, allusions and fragments of dialogue culled from his five-year stint there, with a gang of color coded misters standing in for the Archives crew, the heist for the big score, for making it, Tarantino—the one who got away, who actually directed a feature—is at once Mr. Orange, who betrays them, and Mr. White, the veteran thief who loves him anyway and forgives him."
Such critical-biographical nuggets are sparse, though, and considering the movies, this approach seems defensible. One of Biskind’s masterstrokes is his description of Miramax, now a semi-autonomous Disney fiefdom, as the distribution equivalent of an ongoing auteurist experiment. Harvey Weinstein and his brother Bob—who runs Miramax sister company Dimension—saw themselves as socially disreputable outsiders who fought their way to the inside through sheer force of will. Miramax movies are personal only if you accept the proposition that the personal is political, and vice versa. As Biskind shrewdly observes, with few exceptions, Miramax’s signature movies retell the Weinsteins’ story in mythic terms, celebrating the outsider, the visionary, the pariah or all three. The drawback of Miramax’s passive-aggressive autobiographical impulse is that in movies, there can only be one auteur. (Which, suggests Biskind, is why Harvey had problems dealing with some homosexual directors; deep down, he was always looking for autobiographies, and he’s not gay, all right?) If it’s not the director, Biskind suggests, then the producer will gladly step up, and perhaps that’s what the producer always secretly wanted in the first place. The Weinsteins (Harvey especially) stepped up so often, and with such overwhelming charisma and force, that few directors were strong enough to preserve their own visions. (Tarantino seems the sole exception to this rule: a two-fisted vulgarian who wouldn’t back down, ever.)
All in all, Dirty Pictures seems less a biography of a mogul or a history of recent American filmmaking than a nasty, extremely personal prosecutorial document: the Starr Report of independent cinema. Like the Starr Report, it’s packed with needless but very entertaining details, about everything from Weinstein’s dietary habits and nicotine addiction to his talent for figuring out exactly what personal buttons to push in order to wring a favorable deal from a filmmaker, then jabbing them until the springs pop out. Those hoping for a comprehensive recent history of American film or a deep slice of pop culture analysis won’t find it here. But if you’re willing to settle for a juicy, sometimes superficial but often shockingly candid assessment of the nation’s most lucrative export and the folks that control it, Dirty Pictures is worth a look.
